


The Ghosts That Sell Memories

by RileyC



Category: Ian Rutledge Mysteries - Charles Todd
Genre: M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, World War I, haunted
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-04
Updated: 2013-02-04
Packaged: 2017-11-28 04:29:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/670276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RileyC/pseuds/RileyC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian is ambushed by memories...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghosts That Sell Memories

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from this great song by Tom Waits that strikes me as suiting Ian and Hamish rather nicely,"Tom Traubert's Blues."

 

  
_London, 1921_

Frances is looking for him. All that he has weathered, and his sister worries that a dinner party at Mabel Worthington’s will put paid to him. Still, as Ian glances behind him at the brightly lit drawing room, someone at the piano to provide musical accompaniment to the arch and witty banter, a thread of desperation running through it all, he can see that Frances might be onto something.

Ian moves further out onto the terrace and finds he can breathe more easily now. The voices and piano are a distant, almost pleasant hum that blends with the other faraway sounds of the city. Rain in the afternoon has left the summer air clean and fresh and cool and it’s good to simply stop there for a moment and let the peace seep into his bones. For this brief span of time there are no crimes to untangle, no demands, no memories—and a perfect, blessed silence in his mind.

It lasts all of two minutes perhaps, until a pair of this season’s bright young things drift into his line of sight and unlock a flood of memories as he watches them frolic and canoodle in the moonlight. It’s a different landscape in his mind now, harsh and bleak, and a memory of kisses that tasted of anguish as much as desire. There was no flirtation; nothing coy and playful. Only the need to feel alive; to feel…something, something that wasn’t disgust and fear and despair.

A hand touches his arm and Ian starts, trapped for a terrifying instant in some shadowy limbo between past and present, his only lifeline the sound of his sister’s voice as she says his name. “Ian? Ian?” He nods and swallows and hopes the smile he puts on like a mask isn’t too ghastly. “I’m all right,” he lies when he sees the worry in her eyes.

She bites her lip, bites back the words she wants to say, and looks out into the garden where the bright young things are down by a fountain, passionately entwined. Understanding lights her face as she looks at him then. “I suppose that was you and Jean once,” she says, and he nods and lets her think that’s it.

_“We know better, though, don’t we?” Hamish whispers in his mind. “’Tis not fair Jean you were thinking of just now.”_

No, not Jean; never her cool and perfect elegance. In his memories, it was a rough and brawny body that pressed against him, a scrape of stubble against his face, and a Highland burr that rumbled in his ear as they sought and found some solace in each other, in the shadows of the horror all around them.

Frances could never understand that. Not the yearning that rose within him to experience comfort like that again.

_“The lass might surprise you.”_

“Sometimes illusions are all we have to cling to,” he says, louder than he’d meant to judge by the puzzled look Frances gives him now.

“Ian…?”

“It’s all right,” he tells her and wishes he could cling to the illusion of that promise. “We should go back inside.”

She nods and takes his arm, but pauses a moment to glance back into the garden as if she might glimpse something of the ghosts that haunt him.

She never will. Ghosts and their memories are almost all he has now and he guards them well.


End file.
